At Lean Startup Machine this past weekend, I was struck by the realization that a well-known facilitation approach in the Product Management and Agile communities, Innovation Games®, can be used to boost insights and learning about customers, their problems, and their needs. Here a quick visual before I motivate the problem: Customer Discovery and Validation [...] Continue reading »

Product Camp Toronto was above all a great networking opportunity since there were lot's of breaks between sessions for conversation. The day started with people sitting at tables chatting - and boy was there a buzz! In this post I am going to give a quick pass at the four sessions I was at: Keynote [...] Continue reading »

Have you been on a software project where each release gets harder and harder? Many projects fall into the tar pit of the Design Dead Core. Why do nearly all software projects fail to balance short term choices with long term consequences? Through game-play you will experience how hard it is to make effective choices. [...] Continue reading »

Here is the way one way to see Innovation Games® (Click for hi-res image). The diagram came out out Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games® Master class in September. In my search for order, I decided there were three main categories of innovation games: Generative - for generating new product ideas Prioritizing - understanding relative priorities of different [...] Continue reading »

Here are the slides and reference links for the session Gino Marckx and I are giving at Agile 2010 in August Triangle Model Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in [...] Continue reading »

Subtitle: How we created and played a brand new game all in one day. On Day 2 of DeepAgile, Michael McCollough and Don McGreal got us started on with a game design workshop. From there we used open space to invent and play the game with other attendees. This blog shares what we learned about [...] Continue reading »

Derek Longmuir presented ThoughtWorks QTB on working with legacy systems. You can see the video and slides on InfoQ. I like the definition given by Michael Feathers: Legacy code is simply code without tests. Legacy Systems have Value. They are usually business critical and feature rich. They may even be stable and reliable (YMMV). Hint: [...] Continue reading »

Part of my standard training for Product Owners is to help them understand how they relate to everyone else in an Agile/Scrum world. Hence the drawing below. Project Community Diagram The Product Owner is not part of the team since their role is to ask for more to keep productive tension in the system. I like the way [...] Continue reading »